The film version of Murakami’s 2020 short story “Drive My Car” is a three hour meditation on grief, forgiveness, and redemption. A stage actor and director named Yusuke Kafuku travels from Tokyo to Horshima to mount a performance of the Anton Chekhov play Uncle Vanya. As written by Murakami and interpreted for film by director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Kafuku comes off as stubborn, stoic, hiding his true self. Kafuku is a prototypical Murakami make. He curates a classical music collection on vinyl, smokes cigarettes, and cannot seem to understand the motivations of women in his life. The film version, which won the International Feature Film award at the 94th Academy Awards last March 28, compelled the author to note:
“I was not sure which portions I had written-which came from my original work and which hadn’t.”
Such are the problems of cinematic and linguistic interpretation. It is impossible to avoid the fact that much of an original text’s essence will simply not make it through the translation process. Murakami’s short story, a mere 33 pages, was re-shaped and re-positioned for film. It’s in the original text, rendered in English by his longtime translators Phillip Gabriel and Ted Goosen, that the story comes alive. Kafuki need a driver. Misaki Watari is the type of female Murakami character that proves mysterious, oppositional, independent and alluring:
“She had big, strikingly clear eyes that looked out suspiciously on the world…ears like satellite dishes placed in some remote landscape.”
The couple settle into a pattern. She is his employee, literally in the driver’s seat, bringing him through Japan to supervise the mounting of the Chekhov play. It won’t escape the informed reader that Murakami’s themes are the same as Chekhov was considering in Uncle Vanya: lethargy, boredom, a wasted life. Initially, they don’t speak during their drives together, instead opting to listen to Beethoven String Quartets or the Beach Boys, Young Rascals, Temptations. All along, it seems, Kafuku is trying to get a read on this mysterious driver but she won’t budge. “”She was a young woman who didn;t show her emotions.”
Murakami keeps us at arms length from Kafuku, choosing a distant third person voice that could take a while for the reader to accept. He’s cold. The characters are cold. Mourning an apparently unapologetic wife was difficult. Kafuku was “smiling calmly when his heart was torn and his insides were bleeding.”
Two months into their work relationship, Misaki cuts to the essence of her employer. She asks why he doesn’t have any friends and he can’t explain, instead claiming his wife saved him from having to make friends. Misaki discloses that her mother died while driving drunk. Halfway through this story Murakami gives away another clue about the connection between music and the logical drive of his narratives: “A song doesn’t reach its proper end until it arrives at a final, predetermined chord.” Have patience, he’s telling us. These words are notes, the paragraphs are chords, and blended together they create logical rising action, harmony, counter-melodies and harmonies, in the background all along as these characters work out the unfinished and disturbing rhythms of their lives.
There’s tenderness and forgiveness throughout many scenes in this story. Kafuku meets Takatsuki, an actor who had had an adulterous relationship with his wife and they spend a while bonding over their mutual grief, both reflecting based on the degree of intimacy they shared with this woman we are never allowed to meet. “How would his [Kafuku’s] wife feel if she observed them sitting together like this?”
Drive My Car is an elegiac balance of confession and regret, impulses to seek revenge and acceptance that the best move is to always drive on, at a moderate speed, into that inevitable final chord conclusion. The story perfectly balances the flashback scenes between Kafuku and Takatsuki and Kafuku and Misaki. Why is Kafuku revealing this painful past to this woman? He doesn’t know.
As Murakami’s legions of readers have understood since he first came on the scene in 1978, his style is an infectious mixture of magical realism (Kafka On The Shore, A Wild Sheep Chase), romance born from a love of Western culture (Norwegian Wood), and an epic mix of everything (1Q84). Also of note are non-fiction (Underground:The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche), memoirs (What We Talk About When We Talk About Running), and a short story collection motivated by the 1995 Kobe earthquake (After The Quake.) There are more selections, and they’re not all great, but Murakami’s track record of excellence since 1978 is impressive.
“Everytime I write a book I put my feet in different shoes,” Murakami once noted. “Because sometimes I am tired of being myself. This way I can escape…If you can’t have a fantasy, what’s the point of writing a book?”
SAMPAN, published by the nonprofit Asian American Civic Association, is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England, acting as a bridge between Asian American community organizations and individuals in the Greater Boston area. It is published biweekly and distributed free-of-charge throughout metro Boston; it is also delivered to as far away as Hawaii.
